up your mind for yourself when I'm through--whether
it's necessary or not!" retorted Danglar viciously. "I've got a little
proposition to put up to you, and maybe it'll help you to add two and
two together if I let you see all the cards. Understand? You've had your
run of luck lately, quite a bit of it, haven't you, you and the White
Moll? Well, it's my turn now! You've been queering our game to the
limit, curse you!" Danglar thrust his working face a little farther over
the table, and nearer to the Adventurer. "Well, what was the answer?
Where did you get the dope you made your plays with? It was a cinch,
wasn't it, that there was a leak somewhere in our own crowd?" He laughed
out suddenly. "You poor fool! Did you think you could pull that sort of
stuff forever? Did you? Well, then, how do you like the 'leak' to-night?
You get the idea, don't you? Everybody, every last soul that is in
with us, got the details of what they thought was a straight play
to-night--and it leaked to you, as I knew it would; and you walked into
the trap, as I knew you would, because the bait was good and juicy, and
looked the easiest thing to annex that ever happened. Fifty thousand
dollars! Fifty thousand--nothing! All you had to do was to get a few
papers that it wouldn't bother any crook to get, even a near--crook like
you, and then come here and screw the money out of a helpless old man,
who was supposed to have been discovered to be a miser. Easy, wasn't it?
Only Nicky Viner wasn't a miser! We chose Nicky because of what happened
two years ago. It made things look pretty near right, didn't it? Looked
straight, that part about Perlmer, too, didn't it? That was the come-on.
Perlmer never saw those papers you've got there in your pocket. I doped
them out, and we planted them nice and handy where you could get them
without much trouble in the drawer of Perlmer's desk, and--"

"It's a long story," interrupted the Adventurer, with quiet insolence.

"It's got a short ending," said Danglar, with an ugly leer. "We could
have bumped you off when you went for those papers, but if you went
that far you'd come farther, and that wasn't the place to do it, and we
couldn't cover ourselves there the way we could here. This is the place.
We brought that trick table here a while ago, as soon as we had got rid
of Nicky Viner. That was the only bit of stage setting we had to do
to make the story ring true right up to the curtain, in case it was
necessary. It